INSPIRE Conference 2017: Facilities, Utilities and Public Services Cluster Activity Report

Workshop:“Towards an INSPIREd e-Reporting?”

Workshop aimed at triggering a discussion about the state and outlook of the practical use of INSPIRE for an enhanced environmental reporting, using as a baseline the EEA-DG ENV concept paper “The future of eReporting and the link to INSPIRE” as well as the experience gained from implementation cases such as the EU Registry on Industrial Sites. Member States representatives shared their national experiences, best practices and recommendations, identify windows of opportunity and challenges when using INSPIRE in reporting processes.

- Impact of INSPIRE on current environmental reporting process, with a focus on the short and medium term (e.g. SWOT analysis; benefits and challenges of implementation options; impacts on current national reporting workflows)

- New visions for environmental reporting, with a long term focus (e.g. risks and opportunities in the paradigm change from a push to a pull approach, both from a technical and a legal perspective; use of novel data sources such as crowdsourcing or Earth observation such as Copernicus; infrastructure needs to address these new requirements)

The outcomes of the workshop are expected to be consolidated in an executive summary which will be a valuable contribution to the formulation of a stepwise and pragmatic roadmap for an enhanced environmental reporting re-using INSPIRE.

This Workshop was promoted on the INSPIRE Thematic Cluster in order to engage the participation of registered experts. Outputs will be also shared once publically available.

Meeting the members of the Thematic Clusters:

A face-to-face meeting was organized with experts of the INSPIRE Thematic Cluster on Facilities, Utilities and Public Services took place on Wednesday Sept, 6th 15:30 – 16:30 at the INSPIRE booth.

This was an excellent opportunity to get in touch and exchange views regarding INSPIRE implementation on the cluster and share best practices, experiences and issues related with the scope of the cluster.

Despite the participation in terms of participants was quite low, the comments received were very helpful to understand the general status of the implementation and in particular in relation within the Production and Industrial Thematic Cluster. Stefania Morrone from Epsilon-Italy joined the discussion as she has been actively involved on the extension of the Production Facility model for PRTR - IED reporting.

Some important outputs of the discussion were:

  • The community around PRTR is waiting for outputs on Reporting and linkage with INSPIRE in order to start working on implementation. So then keep this community updated about status of the discussion and engage them in some pilot and testing would be really advantageous. Workshops and meetings within this community are being organized. A point in the agenda could be the status of this discussion.

More info about this model is available in the Thematic platform:

  • Despite the difficulties to understand the scope and purposes of the Activity Complex model, this was described as very useful with similarities on scope and terminology with inter-government entities defined as result of cross harmonization initiatives for Facilities related datasets.

Sub-clusters Activity:

  • Production and Industrial Facilities: Core of the Cluster discussion is focus on this thematic area because of the mentioned linkages with the e-reporting for IED. Key INSPIRE stakeholders play an important role in order to support the community in following the status of the discussion. It would be great to provide them with support, examples as good practice by different ways: webinars, training material, pilots, etc. Experts in the domain from different EU MS has already expressed their willingness to join this activities if organized. The Thematic Clusters platform could be a very interesting framework to orchestrate this activities.
  • Agricultural and aquaculture Facilities: There is no comments about this cluster. It seems that all facilities are considered under the scope of PF Theme.
  • Utilities, Environmental Facilities and Public Services: There are some implementation examples and extensions of the model at municipal and regional level for both Utilities and Public Services.
  • State of North Rhine – Westfalia:
  • GISWASTE Project – Basque Country (Spain)
  • Mobile Waste Tracking System (MoTAT)
  • MINnD project:
  • Extension of Utility Networks data model in the Netherlands
  • Public safety: